Resource maintenance / missing links...

From our text development team...

As several of you have correctly observed, the single task of attempting to add links from every existing resource to every possible new resource is an overwhelming one and has the potential to be prohibitively expensive. We are neither ignoring the problem nor throwing up our hands, however. Several months ago, we created a dedicated team to assess the multitude of possible updates that could be done to our existing resources. As we have discovered, this is not limited to simply adding links or correcting typos. With the increased functionality and features of Logos 4, we are considering updates to metadata, heading fields, page numbering, biblio milestones, image tagging, headwords and other issues. The team has been creating tools to analyze our resources so that we can prioritize and automate as much of the updating as possible. They have also been drafting recommendations for automating the updating tasks and we are in the process of developing tools for that purpose. After these processes and tools are prototyped and tested, we will be contracting out the vast majority of the manual aspect of the work in order to accelerate the updates to our most critical resources.

While some work has been done on typo corrections, we have run into a significant delay because the system we use to store the typo reports was not designed to scale up to the massive number of resources and users that we are now trying to accommodate. We are in the process of evaluating some different solutions to this problem, but it will be awhile before we will likely have a better system in place.

One issue that is of immediate concern is the "missing links" reported in newly published resources. With very few exceptions, we intend to create every possible link to existing resources when we publish a new resource. The specific examples in this thread are being investigated and will be corrected. We will also be reviewing the typo reports for "missing link" comments in newly published resources. If you have specific examples that you would like to share with us, please add them to this thread or start a new one and we will give those immediate attention.

The thoughtful and helpful tone of this thread is most encouraging and we want you all to know that we are listening and hard at work to make the improvements that you have suggested. We can certainly do a better job of communicating what we are working on and will look for ways to provide that information to all our users.

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Comments

Mark Smith

Many thanks for this reassurance. I can appreciate the near impossibility of this task but am hopeful that with Logos' genius at work a manageable solution that gives us a good chunk of what we'd like may be coming.

BTW: I hope everyone at Logos took this as affirmation of the special value that you have build into your resources.

Todd Phillips

One issue that is of immediate concern is the "missing links" reported in newly published resources. With very few exceptions, we intend to create every possible link to existing resources when we publish a new resource. The specific examples in this thread are being investigated and will be corrected. We will also be reviewing the typo reports for "missing link" comments in newly published resources. If you have specific examples that you would like to share with us, please add them to this thread or start a new one and we will give those immediate attention.

Bob, I'm not sure if the TNTC/TOTC is considered a "new" resource (it came out at the beginning of this year), but it has a special problem that links between Tyndale Commentary volumes don't work correctly. I reported it six months ago in this thread: http://community.logos.com/forums/p/13493/104311.aspx -- The problem still exists.

Mark Barnes

Bob, thanks so much for posting this. I presume the thread you're referring to is Love all the
new resources...but

In that thread I said:

…the Pillar Commentary on
Ephesians contains around 50 references to Stott's BST commentary on the
same book, but none of them are linked, despite the BST being available
in Logos for three years. Indeed, just looking through the
bibliography of that commentary, not a single resource appears to be
linked, even though many of them (ICC, WBC, AB, Calvin, NICNT,
Hendriksen, Schnackenburg, NIVAC, Westcott, Stott, NBC) are available in
Logos…

Pillar on Ephesians is not new, but it was definitely published after WBC, Calvin and Hendriksen.

Mark Barnes

Bob,

Have you considered crowd-sourcing like ancestry.com?

Mark

Mark Barnes

Although it's not strictly a linking problem, the very recent Bible Studies by Deissman had no headword index for the Greek words referred to in chapters two and six. Although it's not a dictionary, these are dictionary-type articles, and should have been indexed so that they appeared in Parallel Resource menus, and in the Bible Word Study.

Milford Charles Murray

Many thanks for this reassurance. I can appreciate the near impossibility of this task but am hopeful that with Logos' genius at work a manageable solution that gives us a good chunk of what we'd like may be coming.

BTW: I hope everyone at Logos took this as affirmation of the special value that you have build into your resources.

Peace, Mark! *smile*

Well-written post! Thank you ... I echo your sentiments ...........

Mark Barnes

Here's an example from a brand new resource (released today!). Sadly, it's missing a few links. The resource is God's Indwelling Presence. It's missing links to at least three resources:

Bibliotheca Sacra (4 missing links)
Westcott, The Gospel According to St. John (10 missing links)*
Dictionary of the Old Testament: Pentateuch (4 missing links)

On the other hand, I'm grateful for the links to Themelios, even though that resource isn't available yet.

* The Westcott problem might be due to a different edition being referred to.

Todd Phillips

Bibliotheca Sacra (4 missing links)

Do you have any resources that link to the Journals? I haven't seen any.

spitzerpl

I'm sure that this is a part of the difficulty, but is Logos playing with ways to update the current 10,000 resources as new resources are added to the books available in Logos? I can't begin to imagine the dollars you are looking at to update those 10,000 resources. The thought of them being out of date again when the complete Logos Library is 15,000 resources is heart breaking.

My hat goes off to you for even attempting these things. I think the reason we want more is because we enjoy the taste of what we've already had so much.

Mark Barnes

There's another new resource with missing links. This time the Pillar New Testament Commentary on Hebrews, again it's just been released. It's missing links to:

Heen, E. M., and P. D. W. Krey, eds., Hebrews, ACCS: NT 10
Peterson, D., ‘Hebrews’, in New Bible Commentary: 21st Century Edition
Wright, N. T., The Resurrection of the Son of God

That said, I noticed links to JBL, which is encouraging as it hasn't yet come out of prepub!

Mark Barnes

Still more missing links in another new resource. This time the Pillar Commentary on Philippians:

Harris, Murray J. “Appendix: Prepositions and Theology in the Greek New Testament.” Pages 1192–1193 in vol. 3 of NIDNTT
Louw, Johannes P., and Eugene A. Nida, eds. Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament: Based on Semantic Domains.

Mark Barnes

And one more in ZEB:

Vol 2, pg 577 has a reference to J. B. Lightfoot, Saint Paul’s Epistles to the Colossians and to Philemon [1879], 146–47, but no link.
The same page has a reference to NIDOTTE, 1:658–59.

Ron Corbett

I run across these broken links from time to time. It seems to me that the "fix" is not going to be in users posting individual occurances of broken links but in writing a program that uses an indexed database (one master list - regularly updated) that identifies all resource links in new products and which compares these links to earlier Logos resources and then embeds the target code where needed. Once there is a master database [fully indexed - however that works: with all the embedded information of the location of the link and the target information] I would think that new resources could be developed along the lines of anticipating full integration into the master list.

I am not PROGRAMMER , but I like to help [:)]. As one who admits ignorance to these matters I blissfully submit these thoughts. I hope they are not too bizarre to those familiar with the fuller dimensions of a massive operation like this.

Ron Corbett

On the subject of links ... In Geisler's Systematic Theology, vol. 3 there is a link to the CATHOLIC Church Fathers set (TS in ibid., III.1.9.3–4 ) which does NOT link to the one that comes with the Logos packages

Jacob Hantla

Bob, why not let us help with the work and create a report-link tool? These links could then either be automatically added or manually approved. I don't think this is the solution, but certainly a very powerful and accurate one: http://community.logos.com/forums/t/11689.aspx

Ken Avery

FYI - I have not found one link to the Talmud to be working; for this resource, the links would be very helpful [:D]

For example, the "AYBD" has 704 hits (not sure all should have links), I have not checked them all; though, I have not found one to be working.

God bless you and keep you,

Ken

Jannie van Niekerk

For example, the "AYBD" has 704 hits (not sure all should have links), I have not checked them all; though, I have not found one to be working.

The AYBD are undergoing a comprehensive linking update.

Ken Avery

Maybe that was a bad example [:)]

Are the links in all the documents to the Talmud being updated also?

God bless you and keep you,

Ken